Weekly Food for Thought – Let Your Real Self Please Stand Up

‘Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but … life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.’ ~ Gabriel Garcia Márquez

Dear Friends,

Above the door of the ancient oracle in Delphi (and the slightly more modern oracle in the movie Matrix) stood the words gnothi seauton, meaning Know Thyself.

Ultimately, this of course is impossible – there will always be a difference between the real world and our experience and knowledge of it.

So, if we cannot have an accurate self description the question beckons: what is a good way of organising our thinking about who we are? The answer to this lies in looking at the function of the self image.

But before that, let us have a look at that word:

Self Image

Some people know themselves through making a picture of what they look like. Others know themselves by what they say to themselves about themselves, and others know themselves through feeling what they are. The difference is not trivial and carries with it a key to understanding: just imagine how radically differently you would experience yourself if you exchanged the way you represent yourself with someone who experience themselves through another sensory channel.

Your self concept guides your behavior in the world. It guides what you expect will happen. It guides who you will become.

Your self concept creates a filter through which you experience yourself. If you are not aware that you are attractive for example, you will miss the incoming data saying that you are, and only notice the incoming data that fits with what you already believe.

And it is in human nature to meet the expectations of others. These will of course be influenced by your expectations of yourself.

So here is a question for you. If you could just simply wave a magic wand, what self concept would you create for yourself?

Quality upgrade

It is of course too complicated to deliver a full course on how to change your self concept within just one article, but we would like to invite you to try the following: imagine for a moment that you already had the qualities you want to have. Maybe you would like to be authentic, congruent, aligned, strong, attractive, honest, incorruptible, successful, proud or humble – what qualities you want to develop you will of course have to decide for yourself.

And start imagining for a moment. If you already had the qualities you want to have:

How would you know that you had them? What would you see, hear and feel to let you know that you had them? How would you think of yourself to let you know that you had them?
How would others know that you had them? What would they see, hear and feel to let them know you were a person of that calibre? And how would they react to that and how would they treat you differently?

Spend some time regularly doing this, because as you might know, the greatest secret is that you become what you imagine yourself to be.

Thomas Björge – ITA NLP (International Trainers Academy of NLP) Accredited New Code and Classic Code NLP Trainer and Master Coach and Designer of New Code Game ‘Arrows’, to be featured in Dr. John Grinder’s upcoming book.

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We are expecting an interesting weekend definitely! Given that this is the last module, I want to tell you that during these NLP workshops I’ve learned “weapons” that I can use whenever I need them, I discovered things within myself that I didn’t know existed or I didn’t know how to use them, and I definitely started cooperating with something so powerful, with Unconscious. Once again thank you for that!